Fears of farmers in Somaliland as a plague looms

AWDAL: Muse Aarinte watched helplessly as a swarm of locusts swept into his village, devouring all the crops, bushes and even the leaves on the trees.

Now he fears a plague is coming. Geerisa village, a remote, mud-and-thatch settlement in an arid, breakaway region of Somalia, survived the first outbreak of locusts in January.

But Aarinte doesn’t think Geerisa’s 1,900 families will be so lucky when the second wave comes.

Since December, billions of desert locusts have swarmed eastern Africa, ravaging crops, decimating pasture and threatening the livelihoods of more than 20 million people who depend on farming and livestock for their survival.

“The swarm covered the land and sky as far as the eye could see,” said Aarinte, 93, chief of the village of animal herders, 350 km northwest of Hargeisa, capital of the self-declared Republic of Somaliland.

“They ate everything ... there was no vegetation left. Soon they will return in bigger numbers. It is a curse sent to take land, livestock and people.”

The outbreak, which is the worst in a generation, has seen hungry swarms - some the size of cities - sweeping across Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, feasting their way through hundreds of thousands of hectares of crops and grazing land.

The United Nations has called the infestation - which has also affected Uganda, Djibouti,

South Sudan, Eritrea and Tanzania, Sudan - “a scourge of biblical proportions.”

But so far limited resources have hampered efforts to fight the locusts, particularly in impoverished Somaliland - and the worst is yet to come.

A second generation of the insects - about 20 times larger - has spawned in countless pockets across the Horn of Africa.

Within weeks, they will reach adulthood and take flight.

“The timing could not be worse. The second wave coincides with the planting season and the rains which are due in April,” said Daniel Molla, food security and nutrition advisor for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

“The swarms will wipe clean the vegetation just as it is sprouting. Farmers will have nothing to harvest and pastoralist communities will find little for their animals to eat.”

Molla warned that if the swarms are not destroyed in coming weeks, the population of the insects could increase 400-fold by June, turning the infestation into a full-fledged regional plague, which would be more difficult and expensive to contain.

Locust swarms are not new to Somaliland, a poor, drought-prone region of 4.5 million people, nestled along Africa’s northeast coast with the Gulf of Aden.